“My orders are that it shall appear in the palace this evening to sing to me,” said the emperor. “The whole world knows what I possess, while I myself do not.”
“I have never heard it mentioned before,” said the chamberlain; “but I will seek it, and I will find it.”
Yet where was it to be found? The chamberlain ran upstairs and downstairs, and in and out of all the rooms and corridors, but not one person among those he met had heard of the nightingale. So he ran back to the emperor and said the bird must be a myth invented by the people who wrote the books. “Your Imperial Majesty ought not to believe everything that books contain,” said he. “They are often mere fiction, and what we call the black art.”
“But the books in which I have been reading about the nightingale,” said the monarch, “were sent to me by the high and mighty Emperor of Japan; so there cannot be anything untrue in them. I will hear the nightingale, and I insist that it must sing to me tonight. It shall have my gracious protection, and if you fail to have it here the whole court shall be trampled on after supper.”
“Tsing-pe!” said the chamberlain, and away he ran again up and down the stairs and in and out of all the rooms and corridors. Half the court ran with him, for they none of them wished to be trampled on, and there was a great inquiry after the wonderful nightingale which was known to all the outside world, but to no one at court.
At last they found a poor little maid in the kitchen, who said: “Dear me, I know the nightingale very well, and it certainly can sing! Every evening I have permission to take home to my sick mother some of the scraps from the table. She lives by the seashore, and on my way back, when I am tired, I sit down to rest a while in the wood, and then I hear the nightingale. Its song makes the tears come into my eyes, and I feel as if my mother were kissing me!”
“Little maid,” said the chamberlain, “I will procure you a permanent position in the kitchen, and permission to see the emperor dining, if you will take us to the nightingale, for it must appear at the court this evening.”
Then they all went out into the wood where the nightingale sang. As they were going along at their best pace a cow began to bellow. “Oh,” said the courtiers, “that is it! What a wonderful power there is in the song for such a small creature! And we certainly have heard it before.”
“That is a cow bellowing,” said the little maid. “We are a long way yet from the place where the nightingale sings.”
Presently some frogs began to croak in a marsh. “Beautiful!” said the Chinese court chamberlain. “Now I hear it. The sound is just like the tinkling of tiny church bells.”